Kenny Cupers is Professor of Architectural History and Urban Studies at the University of Basel, where he co-founded and leads the Urban Studies division. Trained as an architect, urbanist, and historian, his research and teaching focus on the relationship between built environments and changing societies in African and European contexts.

He is currently working on two book projects, grounded in historical and collaborative research in Kenya. The first examines how workers and peasants mobilized arts and architecture to unmake the plantation system. It draws on a collaboratively produced archive with Kenyan theatre performers, activists, and literary scholar Dr. Makau Kitata (kamiriithuafterlives.net). The second project, with art historian Dr. Prita Meier, is an urban history of post-independence Nairobi that maps the ambiguous lives of liberation and consumption.

Cupers’ recent work explores the planetary politics of design. His book The Earth that Modernism Built: Empire and the Rise of Planetary Design (2024)  rewrites the history of architectural modernism for an age of rising global inequality and deepening environmental crisis. He co-directs (with Orit Halpern and Claudia Mareis) the Sinergia project Governing through Design: An Interdisciplinary Phenomenon (2020-2025). As part of this project, he co-coordinated (with Dr. Laura Nkula-Wenz) South Designs: Planetary Futures.

A related strand of work concerns the coloniality and worldmaking capacity of infrastructure. His forthcoming journal issue on “African Challenges to the Coloniality of Infrastructure,” co-edited with Dr. Ernest Sewordor and his 2021 E-Flux Architecture issue “Coloniality of Infrastructure” build on the SNF-funded project How Infrastructure Shaped Territory in Africa (2018-2022). In this context, Cupers’ primary research explores how historical redress shapes anticipations of Africa’s infrastructure boom. Relatedly, he co-ordinated with PI Prof. Bilgin Ayata the SNIS-funded project, Infrastructure Space and the Future of Migration Management (2018-2021).

Several of Cupers’ books explore the role of housing in urban and state transformation. The Social Project: Housing Postwar France (2014), translated into French as La banlieue, un projet social: Ambitions d’une politique urbaine, 1945-1975 (2018), reveals how France’s unprecedented building boom after WWII turned dwelling into an object of state-led modernization, an everyday site of citizen participation, and a domain of social scientific expertise. His co-edited volume Architecture and Neoliberalism from the 1960s to the Present (with Helena Mattsson & Catharina Gabrielsson, 2019) explores architecture and urbanism in processes of neoliberalization.

Cupers also published on everyday urbanism and relations between design and use. Spaces of Uncertainty (2002), co-authored with Markus Miessen, focuses on the importance of leftover spaces for public life in Berlin—a theme he has revisited in Spaces of Uncertainty: Berlin Revisited (2018). His edited volume Use Matters: An Alternative History of Architecture (Routledge, 2013) examines how architecture depended on changing definitions of use throughout the twentieth century.

As an educator, Cupers is committed to the development of the architectural and urban humanities through engaged pedagogy and collaborative research. His co-edited volume What is Critical Urbanism: Urban Research as Pedagogy (2022) offers a toolkit for transversal practice in global urban studies. Public outcomes of his research-led pedagogy include Swiss Corporate Coloniality (corporatecoloniality.net) and Lamu Futures, in collaboration with the Lamu Youth Alliance, Kenya (lamufutures.net).

Cupers received a B.Sc. and M.Sc in Architecture from the Catholic University of Leuven (Belgium), studied visual culture and urban theory at Goldsmiths College (London), and received his Ph.D. in architectural and urban history from Harvard University in 2010.

• housing and urban history
• architectural modernism
• infrastructure, colonialism, and decolonization
• design and planetary humanities

• Eastern Africa
• Western and Central Europe